Million Dollar Outlines - 2013

Part 8: How Accurate is the Above Research?

In the research above, I made some comments that caused at least one reader to say, "Whoa, are you sure about that?" In particular I pointed out that in the top 50 movies, although we often see the story told from multiple points of view, all of these movies tend to put most of their focus on the male characters' journey.

Does that mean that you have to focus on men? Really? More than half the people on this planet are women―about 51 percent of them.

So my reader pointed out that the data may be biased, and I agreed that she is absolutely right. In fact, while writing the article, I almost wanted to stop and give you a caveat, but I decided against it. You see, as someone who was trained as a scientist, I think that there is value in saying, "This is what I observe," regardless of whether I believe the observation will lead to valid conclusions.

At the same time, I want you to understand that I strongly believe that the data does tend to be biased. Here are a couple of reasons why: first, if you look at the list of the top 50 movies of all time, you'll note that they are predominantly special-effects heavy movies. The budgets on such movies are huge―$100 to 200 million.

Let's take one of bestselling movies of all time from this list: Titanic. The movie went way over budget and cost more than $200 million to make. The special-effects budget was huge. My good friend Grant Boucher created the digital ship used in the sinking scene and won an Oscar for it, so I know some of the effort that he put into that effect. Cameron had tried a couple of different ways to get the picture he wanted―creating a large model ship and then using a real ship. Neither delivered the image that he had hoped for, so Grant spent six months secretly building a 3-D model of the ship, and then slipped some footage with it into the mix. Add in a $6 million program to create digital water and―voila!―you're winning Oscars.

But in order to earn back the huge amounts of money spent on such a movie, the studio had to advertise heavily. In fact, the movie was released simultaneously in Europe, Asia, and England all on the same weekend in order to begin retrieving the profits.

On a normal movie that goes out for theatrical distribution the advertising often runs about $8 million. But that money can easily go up to $20 million, and of course if you've got $200 million into the film, you can easily spend $100 million on advertising.

So movies with huge budgets get heavy advertising―which then makes them into hits.

When you see Star Wars Episode VI on the list of top-selling films of all time, or Pirates of the Caribbean 3, what it really means is that the studios went on an all-out blitz on advertising in order to garner viewers.

Movies were filmed, but maybe books were written in conjunction with the film―as many as 27 different books were written to help hype Star Wars Episode I. These books then act as free advertisements for the film. Video games also get made, advertised, and unleashed on the public. Thus when the last Matrix film was made, a record $55 million was spent on the game tie in. On top of those forms of advertising, entire magazines maybe started in order to hype the coming films (an old friend of mine founded the company that initiated this form of advertising years ago by creating the first Star Wars magazine). T-shirts and toy lines are created so that you will see movie ads in clothing and toy stores―not to mention the other merchandise, such as key chains, hats, wallpaper, underwear, and so on. Then there are the cross-promotions―the free Star Wars toys at McDonalds, the Shrek ads displayed on Pepsi cans, the new cereal lines, and so on.

Given the hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisement, it's no wonder that the movie does well.

Of course, all of these ads and cross promotions are easily justifiable. If a movie has enough multimedia appeal it can pull in billions of dollars. The Star Wars movies, for example, might make the filmmakers a few hundred million, but the Star Wars merchandise tie-ins make Lucas $3 to 5 billion per film.